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September 10, 2013

The UK Advertising Standards Authority
(ASA) has banned a Tesco advert apologising to its customers for its part in the
horse meat scandal because the ad implied that the entire food industry had
issues with contaminated meat.

Tesco Stores Ltd (Tesco) had taken out a two-page
national press ad following a scandal where some of its meat products, such as
burgers and bolognese, had been found to contain traces of undeclared horse
meat. The ad in question stated “The
problem we’ve had with some of our meat lately is about more than burgers and
bolognese. It’s about some of the ways we get meat to your dinner table. It’s
about the whole food industry.”

Two complainants (one an independent
butcher) challenged whether the line “it’s
about the whole food industry” was misleading because it implied that there
were issues with meat standards across the whole industry, effectively
spreading the blame across the sector, and because it unfairly denigrated food
suppliers who had not been implicated in the supply of mislabelled meat
products.

In its defence, Tesco argued that the
advert was intended to show it was taking the horse meat issue seriously and was
listening to its customers, as well as showing their commitment to simplifying
and improving their supply chain. Tesco said that there was no reference to any
other producer, retailer or supplier and that they had not attempted to shift
or share the blame and they claimed that the ad focused solely on Tesco by
using words such as “problem we’ve had” and “our meat”. That said, they also pointed
out that the advert acknowledged that Tesco had not operated in a vacuum and that
the meat contamination issue was due to systematic failings in the food supply
chain. They also said that new legislation to deal with the problem would cover
the whole European food industry.

While the ASA concluded that the advert
had not denigrated other suppliers as no specific marketer or product had been
named, they nevertheless considered that the ad did imply that all food
retailers and suppliers were likely to have sold contaminated meat products,
not just Tesco, when in fact relatively few instances of meat contamination had
been found by the time the ad appeared. The references to the “whole food industry” were therefore
misleading and the fact that the whole food industry would be governed by new
legislation did not in itself spread the blame across the whole sector.

These complaints serve well to highlight
the on-going sensitivity and concern across the food industry. Whatever Tesco’s
motives in choosing the wording of the advert, whether desperation not to be
seen as the sole perpetrator or just an attempt to draw a line under the
debacle gone horribly wrong due to sloppy drafting, the ruling serves to illustrate
how broad brush claims can land marketers in hot water. General and broad
claims should be avoided unless they are capable of objective substantiation
(via documentary evidence) and adverts must not mislead customers.